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Israeli police were in a standoff Monday with a Palestinian man who carried a gas canister onto the roof of his home in a Jerusalem flashpoint district as his family faced eviction. The Sheikh Jarrah neighbourhood resident threatened to blow up his home rather than let his family be forced out.
Israeli media reported that Mohammed Salhiya had threatened to set himself on fire if the eviction order from the Sheikh Jarrah area of Israeli-annexed East Jerusalem was carried out. Salhiya’s family has been facing an eviction threat since 2017, when the land where his home sits was allocated for school construction.
Police and the Jerusalem municipality said in a joint statement that delegates went to the home early Monday to carry out an eviction order after the Salhiyas ignored “countless opportunities” to vacate the land as ordered.
Scores of police in riot gear surrounded the property from early morning during an hours-long stand-off. Roads were sealed off around the area, about one kilometre north of Jerusalem’s Old City walls, where clashes often erupted last year between Palestinians and Jewish settlers.
Jerusalem’s municipality expropriated the land, in an area Israel captured and occupied in a 1967 war, along with the rest of East Jerusalem, and later annexed, in a move not recognised by the international community.
An Israeli court ruled in favour of the eviction.
“I will burn the house and everything in it, I will not leave here, from here to the grave, because there is no life, no dignity,” Salhiya said as he stood on the roof of the building, surrounded by gas canisters. “I’ve been in battle with them for 25 years, they sent me settlers who offered to buy the house and I did not agree.”
“We’ve been in this home since the 1950s,” said another Salhiya family member, Abdallah Ikermawi, from the roof of the home. “We…
Source : france24
